In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure Microsoft SQL Server on your CentOS 7. For those of you who didn’t know, Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network (including the Internet).
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Microsoft SQL Server (MS SQL) on a CentOS 7 server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Microsoft SQL Server on CentOS 7
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
yum clean all yum -y update
Step 2. Installing Microsoft SQL Server.
To begin, we’ll need to add two repositories to our software sources list:
wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/mssql-server.repo wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/prod.repo mv *.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/mssql.repo
Then install the packages using yum package manager, as usual:
yum install -y mssql-server mssql-tools
Step 3. Configure MS SQL server.
Once the installation is complete, you will be reminded to run the configuration script (/opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr-setup) to accept the license terms, set the password for the SA user, and start the service.
/opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr-setup
Result:
Microsoft(R) SQL Server(R) Setup You can abort setup at anytime by pressing Ctrl-C. Start this program with the --help option for information about running it in unattended mode. The license terms for this product can be downloaded from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=746388 and found in /usr/share/doc/mssql-server/LICENSE.TXT. Do you accept the license terms? If so, please type "YES": YES Please enter a password for the system administrator (SA) account: Enter Admin Password Please confirm the password for the system administrator (SA) account: Re Enter Admin Password Setting system administrator (SA) account password... Do you wish to start the SQL Server service now? [y/n]: n You can use sqlservr-setup --start-service to start SQL Server, and sqlservr-setup --enable-service to enable SQL Server to start at boot. Setup completed successfully.
Finally, Start the MS SQL Service:
systemctl start mssql-server systemctl enable mssql-server
Step 4. Configure Firewall for MS SQL.
Configure the firewall to allow 1433 port so that we can access the SQL server from external machines:
firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=1433/tcp firewall-cmd --reload
Step 5. Connect to MS SQL server.
Once the installation is complete, connect to the MS SQL server using the following command:
sqlcmd -H 127.0.0.1 -U sa Password: 1>
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Microsoft SQL Server. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Microsoft SQL Server (MS SQL) on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Microsoft SQL Server website.
